The British Bull Terrier

Julian Barnes: Pulse, The Sense of an Ending, and “Homage to Hemingway,” and dogs (but not enough).

by Matthew Rickart

Updike in the yard of his New England home shortly after the photographer threw a tennis ball.

If the internet were as literary-loving as it is dog-loving, then there would be a meme series dedicated to how much late American author John Updike looks like a bull terrier. And eventually someone would catch on that British author Julian Barnes looks like a fittingly Anglicanized John Updike, so therefore also like a bull terrier, and that, ladies and gentlemen, would be a perfect world.

This point is two-fold: A) I really like dogs, even ugly ones like the Bull Terrier[1]. B) There are many literary comparisons to be made between the two writers, though none as important as the Bull Terrier link. But I’ll get to these.

I’m new to Julian Barnes (who turned 66 last Thursday). I read his awesome Arthur & George—a true-story “novel” about the unlikely partnership between a half-Parsi solicitor who is framed for cattle mutilations and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (yeah, that guy), who decides to rally to the solicitor’s side—several years ago, and kept up with his New Yorker contributions, but never committed myself to another book. Until “Homage to Hemingway” was published in the July 4^th 2011 issue of The New Yorker. This is the third triangle in the Golden Triforce of brilliant literary works Barnes and his publishers have shipped to the United States this year. The other two are the Man-Booker-Prize-Winning The Sense of an Ending and the short story collection Pulse. Let’s work backwards:

Pulse.

Pulse, which was released stateside last May, is a collection of stories split in two. The first half are the Updike stories (he’s even mentioned, titularly,[2] in one) and the second are the Arthur & George stories, kind of. I’m using these classifications because of my limited Julian Barnes bibliography. At this point I still know more about bull terriers than I do about Julian Barnes.

All of Pulse is about love. The first half—the Updike half—feels lacking, like literary sketches more than stories. The sketches tend to center around couples and build on an outside activity/event that represents their relationship; it’s a little formulaic for an established author. The tones range from amusing to downright really-goddamn-bleak. On the bright side, these early sketches are punctuated, like commas in a list, by a series of exposition-sparse-to-absent dialogue exchanges between baby-boomer Brits over a series of dinners spanning a few years. These “stories,” each called “At Phil & Joanna’s” with assorted subtitles, are amusing, and the voices run together pleasantly, if that can be imagined—but they still have the feel of exercises. Sharp, very funny, incisive, political, sexual, but never really about love (although at times we feel that they’re entirely about love by not being about love). “Phil & Joanna’s” read like Barne’s English upper-middled-class response to Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” though filtered through Updike, so you can strike that “Love” and make it “Sex.” Updike was less a notorious lothario than a notorious litario[3], writing his way through more bad sex than most fan fiction writers manage. But Updike didn’t seem to know it was bad, especially not as he aged. Barnes knows, mostly.

The second half of Pulse is composed of several period pieces, and a notable personal essay. The essay, “Carcassone,” is the best bit of writing in Pulse. It begins like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story full of steam and sexy sentimentalized love-at-first-sight, as the famous European explorer Giuseppe Garibaldi spies a buxom young Portuguese woman through his spyglass. From here Barnes lingers on food and sex for a few paragraphs, and right when you’ve begun to worry that someone’s misprinted early Philip Roth in the middle of your book, Barnes redeems himself and lands on both feet. It is a piece of writing in which each line is eminently quotable, denying yet obsessed with love’s “circumstantial detail,” and

..the frequent literary problem of the vrai versus the vraisemblable. Life’s astonishments are frequently literature’s clichés. (192, my edition)

When we return to Garibaldi, Barnes quotes a historian and assigns the smitten explorer “the divine stupidity of a hero.” Heroes in love or war, he doesn’t mention.

The best of the fiction in the second half is “Harmony,” an odd sort of love story set amongst the late 18^th century Viennese aristocracy. A promising doctor, experimenting with magnets, has luck with a young female patient, restoring sight that she lost in infancy. As a result he patient, a music prodigy, loses her musical ability; her parents get angry, she is skirted away, loses her sight once more, becomes a musical genius, never crosses paths with the doctor again. Barnes plays with pastiche here, and he plays well, always pleasurably skirting the edges of parody. Locales and individuals of note are often censored to an opening initial and long dash. The narrator (pleasingly plural, because nothing’s better than being reminded of The Virgin Suicides when reading any book at all) explains this away: for

…such minor suppressions of detail would have been a routine literary mannerism at the time; but they also tactfully admit the partiality of our knowledge… [and] those philosophers of the human heart who deal in storytelling would have been—and would be—wise not to make any such claim either. (160)

The story is set during the Enlightenment and the doctor is the pinnacle of reason, but Barnes is most concerned with the underlying power of touch: it’s obvious to us that the girl’s sight isn’t restored by magnets, but rather the caresses that move them around her face.

The doctor and patient only have one scene together that could establish them as lovers: she sees a nose for the first time, his nose, and gently teases him. He responds playfully. It is pillow talk, and unbearably sweet. To see them snatched apart later is as heartbreaking as either Romeo or Juliet’s mortal fumbles. This is a story of the heart, not “disorders of the liver or spleen.” We never gets the feeling that he’s over-researched, nor that he typed up the thing on a whim after watching Amadeus; like all the best historical fiction, it simply couldn’t be told elsewhere. “Harmony,” as a sketch, is quite beautiful, framed in baroque scrollwork, and titled on a brass plaque in Latin.

The Sense of an Ending

 

To continue the metaphor: The Sense of an Ending is a sublime watercolor, that feels unsettlingly and earnestly gauche and full of too many sepia-browns and greys. Barnes might excel best at obstinate middle-aged men. He writes them well and that’s what elevates a few of the stories in Pulse from being silly exercises in “gardening” or “hiking” as metaphor. But he really stretches this talent in Ending, perhaps to the breaking point.

It is not a book with an easily summarized plot, but the outlines are simple: the narrator looks back on his youth, his chums, college, his first girlfriend(s), marriage (briefly), and throughout leads us along gently promising an answer to a mystery we haven’t entirely spotted yet. Mostly we’ve spotted his tone (very middle-aged, very English) and that Barnes writes wonderful sentences. Eventually we’ll begin to spot notes of desperation.

Because Ending is an intellectual exercise as much as it is eventually an empathetic one, it has the tenor of academics and age. It is wandering, it is wondering, and it is unfailingly clever. But despite the Englishness and the academic tone (all Brits being Oxford-bred Old Boys or cockney chimney sweeps, of course), Barnes’ narrator never feels superior. Instead the writing enviably manages to make you feel the narrator has stumbled upon the perfect analogy or bon mot alongside you, in real time.

But Ending is not an easy book. And I’ll get to that once we’ve come full circle.

“Homage to Hemingway”

In light of obstinate middle-aged men, perhaps this story, uncollected since its debut in the New Yorker, is the most obstinate. To kill (and thus lay to rest) the painting motif: “Homage to Hemingway” is a tiny locket housing a delicate oil painting of a stubborn, stuck-up bastard. The method Barnes employs is meta-fiction, a phrase that is sometimes nausea inducing for those who are not huge fans of Calvino, Barth or whatever those clove-smokers are reading. The fact of the matter is that all fiction is meta-fiction if gazed at long enough (thanks, Patricia Waugh), but if gazed at via the navel it obviously becomes obnoxious or risks that peril. It’s my opinion that meta-fiction works best when it gazes via the heart and reveals that organ’s weakness. Because, once again, that is exactly what Barnes is doing: a half-muffled cri de coeur.

“Homage to Hemingway” is divided into three parts, each about a novelist/professor teaching a creative writing course. The first professor is in Wales, the second (a little older) is in the Alps, the third (older yet) in the American Midwest. They are all the same professor, but also not, just as we are not our teenage selves for longer than our teenage years. The story’s structure is lifted, loosely, from a Hemingway story called “Homage to Switzerland,” which makes an appearance, as does Hemingway himself, or, rather, Hemingway’s larger-than-his-life ghost, which must truthfully linger over any creative fiction-writing workshop ever assembled.

The story is funny, especially to those of us who have slogged through the post-grand writing of someone who “defended his consistent use of cliché by saying, ‘It’s not cliché, it’s vernacular.’” But “Homage”’s art lies in the crack that runs along the unnamed author/professor, and how we watch it splinter with the decades and each new reinvention of himself.

It’s my opinion that despite the perfect poignancy of Ending and the deftness of the best stories in Pulse, Barnes has accomplished something in “Homage” beyond the grasp (or, fairly, interest and intentions) of most writers of short fiction. He has crafted an individual with no need for consistent empathy, and individual who mostly earns our derision and only slivers of our pity. But we have prejudged him—much like we prejudge Hemingway—by surface. Really, the story harps on the platitude about books and their covers. The closing lines, which offer a repurposing of perspective, may or may not move you. “Homage to Hemingway” doesn’t have the stark brutality of circumstance that, say, Julio Cortazar’s “Graffiti” (a story with similar narrative technique) does,[4] but its desperation is just as strong, and its plea is just as deserving.

Readers of Julian Barnes will unanimously love Arthur & George, because that is an easy, beautiful, puppies-on-Christmas-morning hearth-fire of a novel. “Homage to Hemingway” is hard to find, and Pulse will please most readers of short fiction (though along partisan lines perhaps; the LA Times’ favorite story was the one the New York Times flippantly disparaged). Despite its prizes, The Sense of an Ending is the most difficult of the three to write on, discuss, or recommend. It won’t appeal to fans of high drama, and for all that Barnes writes about the heart, Ending is composed squarely around the mind, prodding it with casual concern. Really, the inability to peg the novel down to any theme other than “memory” is maddeningly what is lovely and off-putting about it.

Somewhere during one of my two sittings with Ending, my step mom was sitting across from me reading Nora Ephron’s I Remember Nothing: and other reflections. From time to time my step mom would share a piece of witticism, usually about forgetfulness. In my chair I’d underline a passage such as

What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? “As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.” Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives? (133, my edition)

I am not making a bid that Barnes is without wit or that Ephron is more concerned with a commercial viability.[5] But how can one recommend Barnes’ novel to anyone over 50 without including the Ephron paperback as a chaser. Or at least a note that puns on it being a short book about memory with an added drumroll and rimshot. It’s precisely the lowness of Barnes’s drama that makes it so supremely melancholic. It’s not low in the sense of Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters” or even a Billie Holiday song, but in that you find yourself examining the minutia of a narrator’s life under the very same microscope he uses—not Garibaldi’s spyglass—and perhaps that’s the point, and perhaps—very perhaps—it’s all a joke, so when you look up again you’ll have a black ring around your eye.

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[1] Though let it be known I appreciate a strong nose and think both the late Mr. Updike and Mr. Barnes are both good-looking men. I share this with my grandmother, who in her memoirs remembers meeting Mr. Updike at a Yale Ladies Luncheon. She says he was very handsome.

[2] Updike being Updike, pun intended.

[3] Like that? Took me 20 seconds to think up.

[4] If you haven’t read this story stop being an asshole and go out and do so.

[5] She is, after all, the director of 2000’s Lucky Numbers, which paired cinema’s most unforgettable duo: Lisa Kudrow and John Travolta. The film was probably only seen on airplanes, except for by the 66 people who have Facebook-liked it’s imdb.com page.